Hi all
My daughter is in Y7, on the face of it doing well and enjoying school. However, she doesn’t ever tell us anything that’s going on in her life. Everything is always ‘good’ and ‘fine’ even though she has shown some signs of distress recently. She has started to be sensitive to noise but this is a completely new thing only in the last few weeks, and seems to be very selective eg when in a busy shopping centre buying clothes she is fine, but when being dragged round a museum ‘it’s too noisy’ with hands over ears etc.
worryingly, after an argument with my husband a few weeks ago, she told him that one day recently she came home from school and thought she wanted to kill herself because she’d had a bad day. She took a knife down from the rack and sat with it for a while but I think this scared her and she just put it back. She didn’t mention this at the time. However all she will tell us is that ‘school is too noisy and stressful’. She won’t let us speak to her teachers, saying she will do this herself, but hasn’t done.
I don’t think she has a serious mental health problem as most of the time she is totally fine. But I am worried about the fact that she refuses to talk to us, cannot express her feelings, and only ever says that she’s ‘fine’. We’ve talked a lot about how talking about emotions is important etc etc. but she just says that the things going on for her at school are private and she doesn’t want us to know. We said that we are happy to respect her privacy but if things are happening that make her want to kill herself then we need to know about them to keep her safe.
I worry that as she gets older and starts to run into more serious problems she won’t tell us anything. She has form for lying/covering her tracks ever since she was a toddler. What can I do? We try and make time for her one on one, take her out in the car, try to engage her in conversation etc
thanks in advance